Tag: facebook

If you thought 20-something nerds in a basement with crazy goggles hooked into a computer, playing a souped up Sims or D&D game where they get to make believe they are someone much cooler … you may want to reconsider your characterizations.

Unlike standard PC gaming systems, VR truly immerses the participants in its make-believe environment. This aspects has gained VR some niche applications across a variety of disciplines: military, police, medical professionals, space researchers to name a few. This allows training in uncharted environments for threatening or dangerous experiences without any physical risks (mostly!).

From a marketing perspective, just how mainstream is the VR technology? It sure has its fair share of innovators and early adopters but is the technology ready to jump over ‘the chasm’ for adoption by majority of the masses?

Similar to other emerging technologies, mass-adoption of VR applications was initially hindered by the high price. When the Oculus Rift came out as a consumer product, it started at $600 with touch controllers costing $199. Pair that with a powerful enough PC needed and one could be forking out over $1500 for a fully functional gaming system … and still be wired to the PC. Other brands have since entered into this market – HTC (Vive), Playstation (headset), Samsung (Gear – from Oculus) and Google (Daydream and Cardboard), few of the big-brand names. Many of these are mobile; Google has just created the ability for their phones (itself priced at ~ $800) to be turned into VR headsets. It’s been 4 years since Rift was released as a development kit, and over the past 2 years they have been selling to a broader customer base.

The evolution of VR hardware is also benefiting from the growth of streaming media and introduction of 3D broadcasting – even NFL is broadcasting some football games in 3D. The movie and TV show streaming giant, Netflix is now providing content for VR in addition to games being created specifically for it. And now Oculus has the Go, a wireless system with a single controller. The target for this product is wireless gaming and media immersion. Imagine sitting in an airplane with your headset and fully immersing yourself into a movie instead of watching it on that tiny screen on the back of the seat that keeps leaning closer and yet not close enough to block out the stranger in the seat next to you. Accepted, similar to the initial reaction to a person talking with a Bluetooth headset, you may freak others around you for laughing and crying to yourself with a funky device over your eyes (and some are definitely worth watching!).

But is the customized personal experience worth it? I say, yes. I believe we are nearing a major turning point for VR technology. Wireless is one step in the right direction, ease of use for personal appeal and social comfort with watching the streaming media may be others. As Oculus moves past developers to targeting the wider market, who would be better to sell them to the masses than our favorite movie and music stars. All the stars are indeed closer in VR!

Prior to writing a blog online, it is important to have some experience with social media platforms. Each social media platform is leveraged in a different way (Reddit vs. Twitter vs. Facebook as examples). It is a good idea to have existing social media accounts and access to existing online social networks. More importantly, ensure you understand how audiences on each platform might react to your content and promotional efforts. A Reddit user may be more likely to engage with a targeted and specific post curated for their interests while a Facebook friend may be more likely to engage on broader messages in support of the friend’s blog.

2. Social Media strategy is key

As you head down the exciting path of writing a blog, it is important to not only have a content strategy, but also have a promotional strategy. The content strategy should outline the types of topics to write about and the social media platforms on which to post. A promotional strategy should identify the intended audiences and how you expect to reach them via the social platforms.

As you develop your plan for building a great social media marketing blog, be thoughtful about your posting cadence (posting twice a week is a good start) and your subsequent promotional strategy (promote heavily immediately after you post to ensure your fresh content is delivered on time).

Without an initial strategy that outlines the topics of interest, the frequency of the posts, the promotional campaigns, and the target audiences, you may find it challenging to get enough people reading, following, sharing, liking and talking about your posts.

3. Identify a topic

Invest the time to identify a topic that is not only interesting to write about but also provides a connection to an attentive audience. While you may think you have a great idea for your blog, if there aren’t enough people interested in the content you may not get anyone to read it.

4. Understand various blog types and select one

Before writing a blog, it is important to understand the various blog types such as: Listicle, Click Bait, Op Ed, or a Product Review. Once the blog types and formats are understood, you should then select the appropriate format for the topic. For example, you can write a product review on something of interest and relevance to you as the writer. This will result in more honest and engaging content that can serve to connect with a targeted audience. Another approach is to choose a topic that is of interest to the intended audience. You may decide that a Click Bait post with nostalgic images or humorous content may be an easier way to promote to a broader audience as a means to drive traffic to your blog.

5. Writing a blog can be time consuming

Don’t underestimate the amount of time it takes to research, write, review and edit a blog before posting it. To demonstrate this, consider a blog that includes original video content. While videos can be an effective way to drive traffic and session duration, they are also very time consuming to produce. Effective videos require frequent editing, re-shoots, voice over sessions, more editing and then copy overlay. Finally, you put it all together, post it to your site and promote it to the masses. While it can be fun, don’t underestimate the time commitment needed to pull it off!

6. Find audiences to drive traffic

With so many different channels available, deciding on the right platforms for promoting your message is an integral step in a successful campaign. Email, Facebook, Reddit, Twitter, Instagram and Tumbler are a just a few of the options available and all have may seem to have benefits.

You might think that email is a great channel for promotion because you have lots of friends and family interested in your content. However, you may find that people often don’t read blogs in their email as frequently as they check their Facebook, Twitter or Instagram accounts.

The trick is finding the right social media platform and the right audience to post and promote your blog.

7. Leverage Google Analytics

Through Google Analytics, identify the key metrics that allow you to monitor your blog site’s performance and measure how well you are reaching the intended audience. Some examples of effective metrics include: number of sessions, bounce rate, average session and duration. Number of sessions measures the number of visitors to your site or campaign (i.e how effectively are you driving traffic). Average session duration provides you with a measurement of how long on average people are viewing your blogs (i.e is your content interesting to the reader). Bounce rate represents the action of leaving the site immediately after clicking on a campaign (i.e is your content relevant to the visitor). To measure how effectively your targeted audience is engaging with your blog, you want your bounce rate to be as low as possible.

8. Adjust your approach if it doesn’t drive enough traffic

There are times when it seems like the topic is relevant to many audiences and the execution of the promotional strategy seems correct. However, something didn’t work. It could have been an issue with the blog title, the blog content, the target audience or the promotion. When this occurs, you have an opportunity to make adjustments to the blog, the social media platform and/or the promotional campaign to a more appropriate audience. If you can learn from your missteps and quickly address any issues, you can develop into a more effective social media marketing blogger.

Usage: This is an editing tool to create stories on Instagram and Snapchat, allowing you to add text and upload videos. You can make stories in advance, email them to yourself, and post them when it’s convenient for you.

Features: Keeping a publishing schedule is a challenge. I like this tool to prep stories in advance.

1. Failure to Create a Strategy with Measurable Goals

In digital marketing, a well-defined strategy is not only the key to establishing a strong direction, but it is also the impetus for aligning valuable content with a target audience. If a digital marketing strategy is missing, both the customers and employees of the organization will not understand the intent of the digital marketing message. Thus, the purpose and value would be lost. Therefore, it is imperative that an organization creates and refines their digital marketing strategies and goals to help them reach their target audience, measure their results, achieve organizational growth and remain competitive in the market.

2. Targeting the Wrong Audience

When starting a new company one of the most important things that are going to determine whether you make it or not is how you will market your product to the consumer, and who you target. If you target the wrong consumer segment, it could destroy your company because consumers will not be attracted to your product. If you target the right consumer, your company could be the next Coca-Cola or Disney.

3. Not Having a User Friendly Website

Did you know that having a website that an unfriendly website design will not only reduce traffic to the website, but it also results in a negative perception of the brand? It is true. So, what does it mean to create a “user-friendly” website? For a website to be user-friendly, it must have a minimum of the following 3 key features:

1. Speed: Customers expect web pages to load in 3 seconds or less. If the response rate is slower than 3 seconds, the customer may click away from the site.

2. Design: The design of the website must be intuitive and easy navigated by someone who is new to the site.

3. Mobile Compatibility: The website must be compatible with mobile devices.

4. Marketing Across Too Many Social Platforms

Specific targeted marketing audiences likely don’t spend time on every social platform. Allocating your resources to the right platform is therefore critical to ensuring your marketing efforts aren’t spread too thin. Start by studying and understanding which social platforms are primarily used by your audience and target the message to the three of four platforms that most closely align with the audience. Keep it narrow and focused for optimal results.

5. Ignoring Negative Feedback

Business on social media helps connect business directly with customers. A business can expect positive or negative comments. All positive and negative feedback is visible to the public. Avoid the temptation to delete or ignore the comments. Business should address the negative feedback as quickly as possible. Customers will follow the company’s response and judge how quickly and effectively they respond. Customers will search for feedback prior to purchase. Social ratings are available in Google review. A company can turn a complaint into a positive experience.

6. Not Leveraging Your Data

Effective marketing campaign managers measure performance through data, research, analysis and other performance tools. Social media marketing requires a similar attention to the data to drive improved results. Social marketers can improve their performance by leveraging Google Analytics or the tools provided by the social media platform. Leverage the data to drive improved results.

Professional Development Series

Interview Spotlight:

We had the pleasure of interviewing Willamette MBA alumni Nick Footer about the continuously emerging market of paid social media advertising, how he got to where he is and where he thinks it’s going.

Tell us about your previous work experience and how you got to where you are at today.

So, way back in the day – by this I mean 2006 – when I was in college, Facebook was the new shiny object. I just geeked out on it; I thought it was the coolest thing since sliced bread. Along with a few other networks you might have heard about, like Myspace, I spent as much time trying to figure out and learn how a business could use these networks to get in front of consumers. Obviously, during that time the networks weren’t designed or optimized for this, but I still did a bunch of my undergrad work on social media, then went to agencies and did everything I could there.

Advertising really started on a lot of the channels like Facebook when they realized they’d need to make money to go public. They started focusing on ad capabilities and all of it was terrible. FB ripped off the same model forum sites had been using, just a bunch of banner ads down the side. The entire strategy was: get a bunch of eyeballs and people will pay. Paid advertising was pretty shitty when it started. It’s gotten better, but in large part, all they’ve done is a better job of hiding the fact you’re looking at an ad, coupled with better targeting. Actually, Facebook has bought a bunch of different companies just to feed in consumer data to improve targeting accuracy. It’s kinda creepy, but also smart.

Like IBM did by buying insurance companies to feed the health records data to Watson? Yes, exactly like that.

What’s changed from an agency perspective?

Five or six years ago, I wouldn’t recommend paid social to any of our clients. But I was also working with small businesses with small budgets so there were better places to spend their marketing dollars. Today I recommend paid social to almost all our clients. It still has problems, but with the additional targeting capabilities, you can get a good return on investment.

When would you not use paid social?

Facebook sometimes isn’t the best for super B2B. LinkedIn has gotten better but you need a large target audience both geographically and in volume to eventually get to the right people.

What challenges do you face in posting quality content within your field?

The biggest challenge is what used to work 6 months ago doesn’t work today and what’s working today won’t work in 6 months. The industry is evolving faster than it ever has and I think this will continue for at least the next couple of years.

Can you give us an example of this?

Sure, let’s stick with Facebook as an example. Content posts where you’re just sharing linked content with a blurb to drive web traffic specifically is dying.

What’s working now is content that’s literally engaging with or trying to get responses with your audience. So actual comments back and forth. This increases its edge rank and helps it show up organically in people’s feeds.

Does that work when you’re asking consumers to engage with a brand?

It’s definitely more difficult as a brand. We’ve seen some success with letting people know who the social team behind the brand are. It’s not faceless IBM, it’s these three people managing IBM’s Facebook account.

Other than the obvious mechanic differences, what other important ways do you think paid social differ from organic?

The difference for us is that is that we do all our testing organically. Once we find the most engaging content, that’s the stuff we then use in our paid campaigns. This has a lower cost for our clients because we’re cherry picking the best.

Also, you always need to think about who you’re targeting. Targeting your potential customers is what paid content is for. With organic, you’re targeting people who’ve already liked your page.

Let’s talk about the difference in B2B and B2C.

In B2C providing specific offers, usually, a discount code or coupon continues to work well. We have an online pet store that’s just murdered it on Facebook. In large part, it’s because they’re offering 10% discounts to people who’ve liked their page.

B2B isn’t rocket science either. It’s normally trying to provide thought leadership and content. We’ve done a lot of white papers and also had great success with getting people signed up for video drip campaigns. You’ve got to make it easy to engage with the content. We make sure we have a really low risk for signing up; all that’s required is an email and these are short videos, 90 seconds and you’re out. We’re also doing Youtube and other remarketing based on them.

What do you think is coming with paid social?

For me, I hate interruption marketing, but that’s still really the only way that we’ve been able to do it. I see a continuation of that through in-stream video, specifically geotargeted and very specific to content. So, if someone snaps a video and says, “I’m outside of this club!”, people who open that up will get a specific ad from that club. It’s going to get creepier in terms of AI knowing what we’re saying, where we are and who’s viewing it through crawling the voice content or the image. To me that’s really going to get pushed is our line of privacy.

Obviously, there are also other smaller platforms. If you have a specific demographic or psychographic which aligns, these can be really effective. There’s probably going to be more of those as Facebook trends down. This opens up some places in the future.

What’s your favorite thing about social media marketing?

What I love most about social media is the ability to communicate directly with your end consumer. Prior to social, you had to pay hundreds of thousands (if not more) to have the type of communication you can now have organically through the internet.

If you liked Nick’s Q&A Interview Check Out Other Posts in the Series:

Lessons Learned

The Social Media Bunnies took on this Social Media Marketing challenge by finding topics that interested us and collaborating to write fun blog posts. The first strength we recognized in our team was the comfortability with different social media platforms. Pooling our networks and social media accounts, we decided to market on Reddit, Tumblr, Facebook, and Twitter as our main channels. In addition, we decided to write articles with specific mediums in mind so that our article would both get views and follow the social norms of the platforms. Throughout this project we learned lessons that will help us moving forward in our careers. Stay tuned while we discuss three factors that had the biggest impact on our blog posts.

1. What is the value of a six second duration session of a Reddit User?

The Social Media Bunnies undertook our competition for viewers (sessions), click-through (bounce-rate), and length of time on the site (session duration). When writing articles, we considered the medium when deciding on a topic for the week. While considering the channel for certain topics, we did not originally consider the effect of these channels on the metrics we were measuring.

Reddit and Tumblr campaigns caused the number of sessions to skyrocket in a short amount of time, with the page duration inversely plummeting toward zero.

Earlier Sharings of Reddit & Tumblr Fame – Analytics

The 2,121 viewers during this time period solidified the Social Media Bunnies’ place as #1 for the number of sessions. In the past weeks, we have focused on sharing through Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn as our channels of choice. The effect on page duration and bounce rates is staggering.

Past Week of Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn Sharing – Analytics

When comparing these strategies, another question comes to mind. In the ever changing world of social media and content marketing, what is the value of a six second session from a Reddit user? Did the content soak into the viewer’s brain during those six seconds, enough to make a lasting or at least subconscious impression? The overarching question of numbers vs. substance comes to mind. In our case, the numbers won while the duration lagged behind.

2. Social Norms and Mediums of Choice

It is crucial to understand the micro-cultures on each of the websites that you choose to engage in, tone and ideas can make or break your article. Posting and engaging in the domains you are most familiar with is strongly advised It also helps to use the resources you have at your disposal, such as knowing your neighbor is a strong influencer on Twitter. Catering your content to your strengths can get you a running head start to achieving your goals.

Social Media Bunnies wrote a Pokémon article because one member had a large network for Pokémon on Tumblr. However, because we wrote the article with a negative spin Reddit reacted badly. Reddit didn’t like how we talked about Pokémon Go needing to be revived because they were still very much active in the game. If we had written the article or at least titled it with a more positive spin, Reddit may have reacted more positively. However on Tumblr it did very well and due in part to having an engaging and original photo that was enticing to click.

We made a crucial mistake with “Apple Goes to the Dark Side”. We were able to keep the article on the first page of the Apple subreddit and getting a landslide of viewers, we violated one of the subreddit rules that forbids users from posting their own content. We would have gotten away with it but we reacted to comments in an attempt to increase engagement and the subreddit realized that we had posted our own content. As a result, the article was taken down and our largest sources of (potentially viral) views was cut off. In addition, one of the Bunnies was banned from Reddit.

Social Media channels are designed for connection. But the connections have norms of engagement, and the network is not forgiving if you violate their rules

3. Dropping the Ball on Bounce Rates

Bounce rate is the percentage of users who land on your website and decide to leave without going to a second page. A higher bounce rate, such as our bounce rate of 95%, indicates that we were not successful in convincing users to stay on our page to digest our material. Our team could/should have counteracted this by incorporating more links and/or multiple pages into our material. This would have been the best strategy to keep users on our pages, however we failed to incorporate this piece of advice. Any bounce rate above 80% is considered very poor by Google Analytics standards and even 70-80% is not is not ideal. One of our biggest problems in this regard is that we boosted our posts on sites such as Reddit and Tumblr, which are not known for creating low bounce rates.

The lowest bounce rate we achieved, was 40% from an email campaign from our United Airlines article. This is only based off of five sessions which suggests that linking our material to the most intended audience, was the most effective way to bring down bounce rates.

Recently, one of our Bunnies did go through and added relevant outside links to such articles as “Apple Goes To The Dark Side”. While we are still waiting to see the result of this effort, we are confident that it will bring down the bounce rate over time and encourage search engine optimization.

Analytics by Landing Page

The End Result

Analytics Overview by Campaign

Throughout this experience the Social Media Bunnies succeeded in our goal of garnering the largest number of views but fell short in the duration and bounce rate categories. Our primary mediums of Reddit and Tumblr were conducive to this sort of outcome. Connecting our content to trending topics in the social media sphere, such as Star Wars, Apple, Pokémon, and United Airlines, enhanced the effect of our chosen channels. The flashy name on the content can get clicks, but to be able to appeal to all the various segments within this interest group is a task for only the most herculean marketers.

Timing – Posting/Sharing the article at the best times will help you get more traffic and engagement. Factoring in the time zones of the target audience definitely helps.

Content Translation – If you want your message to reach a wider audience, a proper translation to native language is a good strategy. Two of our articles have a Thai translation version and it reaches to a handful of a unique audience in Thailand.

The Length of Stay – If we reach the right group of audience, their length of stay on the page tend to be longer as they spend time reading the article.

The length and the content of the post itself matter in attracting more audience. Who wants to read a long post about boring subjects?

Advertising for the articles – When you try to engage the audience with a sneak peak of the content in the post text they would be more engaged and click the link.

Funny and catchy titles get more engagement than the serious ones – even if the subject is not very interesting for your audience, you should create a title that makes them at least smile in order to make them click on the link.

Original content is a key for engagement – for example, creating the video with original ideas and scenes attract people more because they know they will see something new and different from other social media contents.

Targeting closest friends and family is the easiest form of spreading information – the larger the group working on the project or post, the more seeds you have to pump out information. For example, Willamette University students were engaging well with the content because they are in our community.

Graphics such as gifs or movies help adding some content to the articles that can increase visitors time spent on the website.

Social media and Kardashians go together like peanut butter and jelly, and their social media presence has contributed significantly to their success in connecting with and growing their audiences. So, what exactly is it about their media postings that gain so much attention?

Here are the 5 things they’re doing right:

1. Locate your audience

For Kim, Khloe, Kourtney, Kylie and Kendall their audiences are primarily on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and Snapchat. However, look at the demographics and engagement levels on each of these platforms and determine if they are worth the time and investment if your audience is not actively engaged.

2. Don’t just post about yourself

Looking at the Kardashian Clan’s social media presence, their posts are related to news articles, new or upcoming product launches, and promoting shared interests (such as fitness, shopping or makeup). Given that your audience may not want to see 4-5 posts daily of selfies, provide content that may be a shared interest between you and the audience.

3. Link your profiles together

Ensure your audience can follow you on all channels, so link and display your snapchat username to your Facebook, Twitter and Instagram pages and visa versa. By allowing followers to choose their favorite form of social media, it increases awareness and the odds of having consistent engagement.

4. Be platform specific

Ensure that if you have followers on all your social media sites, they are not seeing the same content. Mix it up a little and post different content on different sites!

5. Find your voice

The Kardashians are not afraid to post a meme about themselves or each other, as long as it follows their voice. Find the voice for your company, and post content according to your values.

In the end, these 5 tips from the Kardashians will help you utilize social media for your business (or your personal profile), but no guarantee that you’ll gain 88.9 million followers. That kind of social media fame is reserved for dedicated selfie celebrities.

Facebook is making its creepily comprehensive knowledge of its users available to employers looking to hire help.

Original Contributor: Lesya Liu

Businesses in the U.S. and Canada will now be able to post job openings and review applications on Facebook. Users who are considered to be a good fit by Facebook will see the job listing in their newsfeed. Apparently, Facebook is trying to compete with Linkedin in the job search market using their huge daily user base, but here comes the question; Is Facebook really capable of doing that?“You might lose a chance at a job before you even get your chance”Given the nature of the personal interactions between Facebook users and their posting behaviors, the article argues that applicants would lose their chances in jobs at the early stages because of their posts, interests, and images on their profiles, but this could be a double-edged sword because the firms can match applicants with their organizational culture based on their posting behavior. This would save both sides a lot of time and effort during the hiring process and give applicants another strength by showing who they really are!

“Facebook beats specialty networks in their games”
The article argues that Facebook is trying to beat LinkedIn as a professional platform, however, LinkedIn interaction’s dynamics are different than Facebook’s. LinkedIn targets professionals with high levels of education. On the other hand, Facebook depends on the personal relations between users that would lead to a bigger pool for part-time jobs and low-level opportunities.

“Put paying customers in the driving seat”Although Facebook has 60 million business pages, only 4 million are actively advertising. The author, Lesya, argues that the new job search attempt is just a way for Facebook to increase its advertising revenue by attracting the small businesses. However, Facebook is trying to overcome the fact that its organic reach is almost gone. Therefore, Facebook is making use of the job listings by letting the businesses pay to promote their openings and drive more traffic to the platform.